Welcome to the Book of Synth

Welcome to the Book of Synth. I got my first synthesizer, a Minimoog Model D, in 1979 or ’80. I remember being in my early teens, maybe around 1973 or so, and earnestly wondering if you could ever get the thing back to the way it was originally set up because I was afraid the knobs would go around and around and you’d never be able to figure out where they had started. Even after all my reading about synthesizers, in those years before the internet, I don’t believe anyone had ever clearly stated that the all those knobs would only turn so far.

The first time I actually got to play a Minimoog, in Sam Ash on 48th Street in New York City on my way home from school, in addition to my slight relief about that knob thing I clearly remember the feeling of awe at the sheer sonic power under my hands. Nowadays we take synthesizers for granted. They’re everywhere, you hear them all the time. Back then, when they were new, you could still easily make sounds nobody had ever heard before. The converse of that is that you might never be able to get the same sound again as it was before the days of computers and instruments with memory. The kids these days, why, they have it too easy I say. Software synthesizers abound, and even the “real” instruments today are more software than hardware in some cases. The choices today are endless compared to when I started with synthesizers. The question back then was Minimoog or Arp Odyssey. Now you can have emulations of both on your laptop.

And that’s why I’m writing this book.

There’s a distinct lack of resources today to explain the basic principals of synthesis. Without a firm foundation, it’s easy to get lost and flounder with the thousands of choices you may face on the average soft synth’s screens. My goal is to provide a full yet understandable explanation of all the basic building blocks of sound construction. Because of my particular preferences, and possibly my outlook on life as well, I’m going to use the Minimoog Voyager, my own personal Anniversary Edition model, to illustrate how synthesizers work. The Voyager is an incredible synth. For one thing, they’re still for sale. You can go to a good music store and buy one today. For another, the Voyager covers more or less the complete range of synthesizer basics. It has all the major features, and they’re all clearly laid out and accessible. Each function has its own knob or switch, and while there are a few screens and menus, they’re not actually needed in the basic sound generation process. In fact, Moog Music has in early 2008 come out with the Minimoog Voyager Old School model. The Voyager OS has no memory, no programmability, no screens. It’s an analog purist’s dream, and is very reminiscent of the old Model D.

And that brings me around to the real reason I’m writing this book. It’s all because of my Minimoog Voyager OS t-shirt. I happened to be wearing it when I picked up my daughter from CTY Lancaster in the summer of 2008. One of her friends saw my shirt and his eyes just lit up. He asked me if I played, and said that he had a few soft synths but didn’t really understand them all that well and was getting a bit frustrated. I said I’d take a look for a good synth how-to book, some of which I had remembered from all those years ago, but surprisingly I couldn’t really find any recent, modern, up-to-date ones. And that’s where this book got its start; because of my Minimoog t-shirt.